I've noticed two odd things, and I'm guessing they aren't the only cases. Created a fresh monk, started in Qeynos. First headband quest is to gather 4 gnoll pup scalps and turn them in. Amiable faction (only one religion choice) Guildmaster wont take the 4 gnoll pup scalps, says i need more faction. So i have to go grind faction to start the questline. That's a lot of gnoll deaths to turn in the 4 scalps for a newbie quest. Following along the quest line for shaman epic (in exact order) according to the guide I found and I get to the portion for black dire. I need to go back and repeat the earlier portions of the quest before I can progress any further. Makes 0 sense to the lore of the quest. I get that its easy, it just doesn't make any sense. I don't think this was the way things were originally. /rant
Faction always has been, and always will be a grindy, somewhat miserable part of EQ. But that's part of the experience, and so the best advice I have is to learn to love it. It only gets worse from here on out I'm afraid. I totally understand the frustration about things not making sense. But just like not enjoying faction, things not making sense is just something you're gonna have to learn to deal with, otherwise you are probably gonna be real miserable. Speaking of things not making sense, anyone else excited to skip GoD and go straight to OoW????
Did you turnin your guild note to the monk GM? I know for one of the Warrior quests in Qeynos the default starting faction is slightly below what you need for one of the quests, but the note gives just enough to put you within the threshhold.
I can't speak to the monk epic, but have done the shaman epic myself both the original quest steps and the max faction route. When doing the original quest I didn't have any faction problems with a barbarian shaman. Although I believe I've read you can reduce True Spirit faction killing certain mobs, like the lesser spirit spawns or helping on CoM kills, so perhaps you took a negative hit and didn't realize it. Good point above about turning in your starting note to your guild master. I did do that, but of course don't recall any faction message as it was over a year ago.
Of the ones that have been reported at Allakhazam's, most newbie note turn-ins give you +100 to a core faction (i.e., your class guild faction) with many of them having smaller hits to the other guilds in the city, occasionally with an opposing faction tossed in there. To the OP: you are correct that faction is somewhat brutal in EQ. I support it remaining "as-was" in era, but really wish the approach many other games have taken would come to EQ in the form of getting said factions later on in the timeline is much easier (EQ is set up differently than some of the other games so it couldn't just be a change all the faction tables with X10 hits... but it could be that various zones trash kills give better faction hits for factions from 2 or more expacs back. TSS would lend itself to this really well as you could basically make certain zones faction farms so to speak. Example: Stonehive could be the place to raise all Halfling factions.
